Thursday, May 11, 2017

Kang gives the readers what they really want, and wipes the Inhumans out of the timeline, in 2016's Uncanny Inhumans #2, written by Charles Soule, pencils by Steve McNiven, inks by Jay Leisten.
Things are not going Black Bolt's way this issue: he's lost the throne of the Inhumans, he had to give his son Ahura to Kang the Conqueror, and he just returned to New Attilan to find his ex-wife Medusa making out with the Human Torch. Johnny is legitimately concerned that Black Bolt might lose his temper, or loosen his tongue and blow the place up; but Medusa knows while he might not like it, Black Bolt would accept it. Maybe.
That...that wasn't clear at all. I don't think Black Bolt has ever been shown using a standard sign language (io9 mentions, maybe he should) so he may have ruled by charades for all that time. Black Bolt had to turn Ahura over to Kang to save his life, but Kang had since turned Ahura into a weapon, destroying the Inhumans' history. In the Inhumans' council in the present, Beast notices the sudden disappearance of Gorgon, since his recent time-travel experiments (like bringing those young X-Men from the past) had left him able to see those shifts. He had invented defenses against time attack, though; and created a stable bubble around them. Johnny goes to recover some artifacts that might have clues to when Kang was attacking, but he isn't able to save two of their friends. New Inhuman Reader uses his power to take them back to face Kang in Egypt, but he unmasks and reveals himself to be a much older Ahura.

This isn't a terrible issue or anything, but it's easy enough to poke fun of after Marvel's huge, and ongoing, Inhumans push. That and with Marvel's penchant for relaunches and renumbering, I don't know how many third issues of Inhumans are out there. I also recently read an old Fantastic Four annual, where Johnny seemed very protective of then-replacement member Medusa; so them as a couple makes a bit of sense. (A bit, since I don't see it as a long-term thing.) But I can't believe Johnny would change his chest logo from a '4.'

2 comments:

Shit, I'd root for Kang too if he could go back and erase some of the recent decisions both of the big two have made recently. I'm really surprised he hasn't gone after the time-displaced O5 seeing as how they're not supposed to be here.